Privacy Terms. Skip to content. Quick links. The catch-all forum for general topics and debates. Minimal moderation. Rated PG to PG Polygamy-era Mormons viewed SLC's prostitution as a gentile institution, and tolerated it in the hopes that local gentiles would tolerate Mormon polygamy. The arrangement seems to have worked, though it would be wrong to assume that only gentiles patronized SLC's official red light district But Salt Lake City was growing fast, and a new mayor, John Bransford, hated having prostitution right in the business district.
So he visited other cities, researching solutions. His conclusion: "I could see no other way out of it. Bransford visited Dora Topham dba "Belle London" , Ogden's most accomplished madam, and asked her to build a special "tenderloin district. She later said she saw an opportunity to do good by confining the necessary evil of prostitution, decreasing diseases, and at the same time pulling a profit. With a few partners she formed the Citizens' Investment Company to build the Stockade, but she herself paid most of the costs: reportedly around a half-million dollars.
The Ogden Standard-Examiner wrote, "Former cottages and 'terraces' are being turned into brothels and dives" where "utter lawlessness will prevail. She also created some "parlor houses," each run by a "landlady" and staffed by very friendly women.
Three entrances to the Stockade and three guards ensured that the immoral purposes were confined. More crucially, it ensured that when the police, out of political necessity, staged a raid, someone would set off the internal alarms. The police always found the Stockade dark and deserted. Naturally, the Stockade engendered controversy. The governor and other high officials opposed it.
Newspapers debated it. Some residents on the west side formed the West Side Citizens League to fight it. The Standard-Examiner supported their point of view: The mayor had foisted the prostitutes on a neighborhood, near "the front doors of the homes on the west side of Salt Lake. There had been, to be sure, no talk of building it on the east side.
